Ethics & Psychoanalysis(1)

Term:
Spring 2013

Subject Code:
GPHI

Course Number:
6671

Does psychoanalytic thought involve an ethics? Or can it support an interesting philosophical moral psychology? Freud himself distanced psychoanalysis from any particular concern with ethics or morality, but others, following in his steps (e.g., Klein, Lacan), have stressed the centrality of applications of the notions good/bad in human mental life,as well as our anxious and defensive responses to such evaluations. In this seminar, we will take up broadly the question of what psychoanalysis might mean for ethics through a variety of philosophical and psychoanalytic writings: Freud, Klein, Lacan, Lear, Nietzsche and Castoriadis and others.